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When a Spouse Puts on Google Glass

By Emily Nussbaum August 31, 2013 8:03 amAugust 31, 2013 8:03 am

Photo

Credit Grant Cornett for The New York Times

Emily Nussbaum is the TV critic at The New Yorker.

When my husband initially got Google Glass to research his article in this week’s magazine, I was delighted. I love new gadgets. In certain ways, I’m even more into digital culture and social networking than he is, despite the fact that the man just wrote a terrific book on the subject — and I certainly have more difficulty controlling my use of screens. I’m big into Twitter, I glance at my phone a lot and, unlike Clive, I do check e-mail on the weekend. So I was not only curious about this new device, I knew I was clearly in no position to judge his use of it.

Then Clive put Google Glass on his face. And the judging began!

The initial problem was primarily aesthetic. Phones go in your hand. Watches go on your wrist. Google Glass goes on your eyes, which are, if not precisely the windows to the soul, definitely soul-adjacent. And while Google Glass may not literally block eye contact — and in fact, is designed to be slightly out of the way — it definitely comes close. It never stopped being a distraction to me when we were talking to one another. This was in part because it was only on one side of his face, so it felt less like an accessory and more like an unusual growth. In part, it was because there was a camera on his head, which made him seem like a paparazzi in waiting. (And it didn’t help that he kept making jokes about taking creepshots of me.)

Also, we live in Brooklyn, we’re writers, we ride bicycles, we wear hoodies — we already, let’s face it, embody a smug hipster-yuppie social cliché. Adding Glass felt gratuitous. People were polite to Clive when he was wearing it at, say, a children’s birthday party in Prospect Park, but I kept rudely pointing out that they might feel some pressure to do so — and that when we walked away, they might say something different. Perhaps that seems paranoid, but then, that’s what I would do.

Anyway, when I read the draft of his piece, I worried that I came off as a controlling lunatic: who am I to tell my husband what he should look at while glancing into his private brain screen? Am I Skyler White? But the truth is, his experiment with Google Glass made me realize how comparably social mobile phones are. As much as there’s a brief against phones as a zombie drug that causes us all to ignore the world, in reality, they are something people frequently share with others. When you take a photo, you can hand it over for inspection. When you Google a Wikipedia page, the person you’re with can peer over your shoulder to read it with you. People gather around phones to watch YouTube videos or look at a funny tweet together or jointly analyze a text from a friend. With Glass, there was no such sharing — and as Clive points out, because you often can’t tell whether someone is using it at all, it becomes your own private Panopticon. Even when it’s not on, you assume it is, and then it snubs you. When he was out, he kept sending me pictures of the kids, but to see them, I had to log in to Google Plus. Look, I’ve been spoiled by digital convenience. Just take a photo on your phone and text me the darn thing.

It’s possible this would all have worked out better if I had had Google Glass, too. Heck, the two of us could have bicycled around Brooklyn recording our experiences, as people shouted that anti-Glass epithet at us. We would have merrily ignored their rude remarks and laughed and tweeted about our experiences using the voice-recognition software. Then we would have likely gotten into a terrible accident and been mocked online. I can’t say we wouldn’t deserve it. That’s what you get for messing with the future.

Bruce Grierson wrote this week’s cover story about Ellen Langer, a Harvard psychologist who has conducted experiments that involve manipulating environments to turn back subjects’ perceptions of their own age.Read more…